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J. Lee Thompson's Piccadilly Circus like Melville's Pigalle (Bob le Flambeur) behind the opening titles, a neon-drenched overture to balance narration ("Well, storytelling isn't my line...") and image (a frontal close-up of a driver dissolves to a long shot of his barreling convertible to give the bloke headlights for eyes in a superimposed flash). A quarrel splits the romantic writer (Derek Farr) and his missus (Patricia Plunkett), on the floor below prowls the sardonic dandy cum "landlord by necessity" (Dennis Price). A nightclub hostess (Joan Dowling) is the palliative of choice for the sloshed weakling, a scuffle back in the flat leads to a stabbing, into the ottoman goes her body. The perfumed viper comes up and makes himself at home in the would-be murderer's anxious mind. "I can't think of a worse disease than imagination. Except perhaps conscience." All night long with "the not so eternal quartet," a tidy construction brimming with poisonous cunning. Clammy canted angles are already a Thompson specialty, the camera is placed low to turn telephones and lampshades into baleful totems, and high for the chessboard floor on which the pawns wobble. "Blood and rouge. What an odd mixture." The transposition is Blackmail (a Japanese mask replaces the clown painting) by way of Rope, Hitchcock returns the compliment in Dial M for Murder. Upstairs and downstairs, Soho crossings like a cocktail shaker. A tale that is told, per the cod-Yank narrator, "truth is perverted and impish humor leads me to while away an idle hour or so before I catch my plane back." At its center is Price's plummy scoundrel, swanning in silk bathrobes, seething with misanthropic resentment, giving voice to what might be the director's careerlong credo: "The greatest emotion, after all, is fear." In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |